Not even when the doctor mentioned how quickly it had all happened.
Not even when the funeral was arranged with an ease that, in retrospect, seemed almost too perfect.
My father had been a reserved man.
Methodical.
The kind who keeps receipts for decades and sharpens pencils even when no one writes by hand anymore.
It wasn’t strange that he had left instructions.
It wasn’t strange that everything seemed planned.
The strange thing was that I couldn’t shake the feeling that someone was following a script.
After the burial, people began to leave.
The military salutes ended.
The car engines started one by one.
My mother didn’t come near me.
That was the first thing.
We were the only two people left from the immediate family, and yet she remained by the hearse as if there were an invisible distance between us.
I was thinking about that when the gravedigger appeared to my right.
He was an old man with a sunken face and thick hands.
He wore a dark coat with mud on the cuffs and an old cap that didn’t protect him from the wind.
He didn’t walk like a tired man.
He walked like a frightened man.
He stopped beside me without looking at my face.
His eyes remained fixed on the grave.
“Colonel Sinclair,” he said.
The way he pronounced my rank made me turn my head.
It wasn’t a courtesy.
It was identification.
“Yes?”
The old man swallowed.
For a second, he seemed to regret it.
Then he looked toward the hearse, toward my mother, toward the last mourners passing through the cemetery gate.
He leaned in close enough so only I could hear him.
“Your father hired me.”
I felt a pang of irritation.
This wasn’t the time for unfinished business.
“For what?”
His jaw moved as if the answer weighed heavily on him.
“To bury an empty coffin.”
The sentence didn’t
